Trade show follow-up: the 48-hour window

Most articles on trade show follow-up open with a figure for the share of fair leads that never get followed up, credited to the industry body CEIR. We went looking for that study and could not find it. It is not in CEIR's 2024 research series on engagement on the show floor, which contains no such number, and Sweden's Fairlink has analysed more than a thousand fairs since 1986 without publishing a follow-up share. So the figure is out. What does exist is research on response time, and it is clear enough.

What the response-time research actually shows

The Lead Response Management study, led by James Oldroyd with InsideSales.com and built on three years of data from six companies with more than fifteen thousand leads and over a hundred thousand call attempts, found the odds of reaching a lead were 100 times higher and the odds of qualifying it 21 times higher when the response came within five minutes rather than thirty. Wednesday and Thursday were the most effective days, and 4 to 6 pm the best window for making contact. Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington followed up in Harvard Business Review in March 2011 with an audit of company response times, and its opening line sums it up: most companies are not responding nearly fast enough. The data covers web leads, in the US, from 2004 to 2007. Fair leads are warmer than web leads, but they compete with more impressions, and they cool the same way.

Before the fair: write the follow-up first

Most of a good follow-up is done before the stand goes up. Three things: settle the grading (hot: has a problem and a next step with a date, warm: has a problem but no date, cold: took a pen), write the evening email template with three blank fields for what you actually talked about, and block two hours in the calendar the day after the fair for calls, before someone else books them. Write the script for the day-two call now too, while you still know what you are going to show at the stand.

Day 0: grade and send the same evening

Every contact gets a letter grade and a next step before you leave the stand for the day, while you can still tell the faces apart. The evening email is short and personal: what you talked about, in the buyer's words, one thing you promised, and for the hot ones a proposed time for the call. 'Hi Anna, thanks for stopping by the stand today. You mentioned you are replacing production planning next year and that the integration with your ERP is what decides it. I will call you Thursday at 16.15 as agreed, and I am sending the integration document now.' An email sent the same evening is the only one that lands before the competitors' emails do.

Days 1 to 2: call the hot ones

The day-two call has one job: turn the conversation at the stand into a booked meeting with the right people. The buyer only half remembers you, so open by recapping in their own words: 'We talked about the integration with your ERP, and you said it is the deciding factor.' Then ask what has happened since the fair, and then make the proposal: two time slots, and the names of who should be in the room. The LRM study's best window, late afternoon on a Wednesday or Thursday, is a sensible pick when the fair ended on a Tuesday or Wednesday, which most Swedish trade fairs do. Our script for the second call shows how to build the conversation in detail.

Day 5: the second touch for the warm ones

The warm contacts get the evening email on day 0 and a second touch on day five, and that second touch brings something new: an article on the problem they mentioned, an invitation to a webinar, a question. Not 'I just wanted to follow up'. Our guide to follow-up sequences covers how many touches are reasonable before you park a contact. The cold ones get a thank-you and go on the newsletter list if they said yes to it. Sweden's Marketing Act requires prior consent before you send marketing email to a natural person, so make sure the badge scanner at the stand has a tick box for it.

Autumn 2026 dates to plan backwards from

• 20 to 22 October: Skydd, Persontrafik and Totalförsvarsmässan at Stockholmsmässan, and Scanautomatic and ProcessTeknik at Svenska Mässan in Gothenburg. Call day: Friday 23 or Monday 26 October.
• 3 November: Byggmaterialdagen, Stockholmsmässan. Call day: 5 November.
• 10 to 12 November: Elmia Subcontractor, Jönköping. Call day: 13 or 16 November.
• 11 to 12 November: Battery Innovations Days, Stockholmsmässan. Call day: 13 November.

The day-two call is where the money spent on the fair either turns into pipeline or does not, and it falls to a rep who had fifty half-minute conversations at the stand and now has to find the right words for each of them. In Salesprep's Follow-up module you describe the context, for instance that the buyer visited the stand on Tuesday and mentioned an integration, and practise the call against an AI buyer who barely remembers you. Every call is scored on seven metrics with a written comment per score. Follow-up is available on Pro and up, and three free calls in the Cold call module come with the account, no card required.